The Boat by Nam Le

This is the most wonderful collection of short stories by a young Australian writer, Nam Le. Rather than writing solely about the Vietnamese ‘ethnic story’ experience, as he describes it, Nam Le spans the experiences of the underclasses in many parts of the world. The stories range from the lives of young ‘soldiers’ in Colombia to the experience of a young child witnessing the bombing of Hiroshima to a teenager coming of age in a coastal Victorian town. They are such authentic stories that you feel Nam Le has actually lived these lives and been in these places and times, though of course it is patently impossible. The most moving for me was the story entitled The Boat, which describes in devastating – and there’s a sense of it being almost real time - detail the flight of a sixteen year old Vietnamese girl on a dilapidated junk. It’s the most moving and horrifying account of the experiences of refugees who escape on boats that I’ve ever read and I feel certain it is founded in truth. Every paranoid red neck who screams about so-called illegal immigrants coming here on boats should be forced to read this story.